Sign in

Three Nobel Women

Three women won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning, in two countries and with other distances between them. Tawakkol Karman, who is thirty-two, was in a tent in a square in Yemen when the news came; she has been organizing public protests there, in the course of which she has been arrested and threatened by President Saleh. (“Control your sister,” Saleh told her brother, as Dexter Filkins reported in a piece from Yemen.) Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who is seventy-two, is the President of her country, Liberia—the first woman to hold that office anywhere in Africa—and is up for reelection in just a few days. She came into office in the aftermath of a civil war that the third winner, Leymah Gbowee, helped to end by organizing women to say no to the fighting. Gbowee is thirty-nine. All three are remarkable. Gbowee, having confronted warlords, has also dealt easily with Stephen Colbert. (Video below; he was very interested in a sex strike she had organized.) And yet the struggles each is engaged in are at very different stages. So why were they grouped together?

The simple answer is that they are women who work for peace—is that enough? In this case, maybe, if one considers what, in the Nobel mind, women have to do with war, and, more important, how that idea has changed.

One of the very first Nobel prizes, for 1905, went to the fantastically named Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicita von Suttner, née Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau, a pacifist who had been one of Alfred Nobel’s friends, and briefly his secretary. At a banquet for her in Norway, Jorgen Gunnarsson Lovland, the Chairman of the Nobel Committee, gave this toast (the full text is on the Nobel Web site):

Women have encouraged the ideas of war, the attitude to life, and the causes for which men have fought, for which their sons were brought up, and of which they have dreamed. Any change or reformation of these ideas must be brought about chiefly by women. The human ideal of manly courage and manly deeds must become more enlightened; the faithful worker in all spiritual and material spheres of life must displace the bloodstained hero as the true ideal. Women will cooperate to give men higher aims, to give their sons nobler dreams.

Women, in other words, had a particular role in bringing peace—and yet it was one that, from the sound of it, could be accomplished by non-baronesses without leaving the house, or taking on any title other than those achieved by birth or marriage. They could raise better sons, and idealize heroes who weren’t “bloodstained.” And then those boys and men would take care of the actual mechanics of it—for their sake, if not with their cooperation.

Another model of woman as peacemaker can be seen in the 1976 prize, which was also shared, by two Irish women, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams. Corrigan, at thirty-two, was the youngest person to ever get the prize, and Williams, who was thirty-three, was the third youngest. (Between them was Rigoberta Menchu; the four youngest prize recipients have all been women.) They started a peace movement after a car chase and shootout in Belfast left a young mother injured and her three children dead. Williams, the Nobel presentation speech noted, was a “housewife” who was just passing by; Corrigan was “the aunt of those children.” The story here is of ordinary women—that is, non-political ones—who point out the senselessness of violence, and tell people to stop. That is important and remarkable, too. But it should take nothing from Corrigan or Williams to suggest that domesticity is not the only school for peace.

That seems to be the point the Nobel committee is making now with this prize. Its press release said that it was being given to Karman, Johnson Sirleaf, and Gbowee

for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.

“Full participation in peace-building work”: What sort of work is that? It is the work of citizenship, which includes the family and the civil sphere, but also the political life. (Filkins described how Karman’s very presence as a speaker at rallies was startling, before she said a word.) Making sure that women can engage fully in politics as a profession—and are not prevented by law, war, or customs—does not guarantee you peace, except in the sense that the denial of those rights is itself a sort of violence. But it puts the problem of war and peace in the proper arena, and allows the potential problem-solvers in. And that is well worth a prize.